MOVIE REVIEWS

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Life Is Beautiful - A Movie Review!

Video Source: PLUTO TV app

Life is beautiful through the eyes of the hero (Benigni) because he is so chirpy and infectiously positive about everything and seems to be always falling into comedic situations. He is mistaken for a king in one scene and masquerades as a school superintendent in another. He falls over the heroine twice and valiantly kidnaps her on a horse painted green while she is being married to another man.

The movie uses fast editing to indicate the passage of time as we see the heroine enter a room covered with strings of flowers when they have just married and out walks their child about 5 years old and gets on his dad's bicycle !

But then the story takes a turn; we hear the innocent boy ask his dad why a store sign says ‘No Jews or dogs allowed ‘ and the father, in order to maintain the young boy’s innocence says ‘It does not matter. Some stores have signs saying cats and dogs are not allowed or spiders and roaches not allowed’.

It was the time of Nazi Germany and so angry German soldiers take captive hundreds of Italian Jewish men who are taken to a prison concentration camp. The young boy is forced to stay with his father in a crowded room, which has wooden bunk beds where several dozen men are squeezed in! They are separated from the mother who is in another part of the camp !

To avoid the kid from panicking, his dad tells him that this is all a game and at the end they will win a tank. He continues this positive charade in front of the kid till the very end. Specially hilarious is the scene where he volunteers as a German to English translator for a German soldier without knowing a word of German language!

In the end, our hero goes out looking for his wife after hiding his son in a metallic box on a street and is shot by a German soldier. Then the streets become empty as the German soldiers seem to have vanished. The young boy comes out from his hiding place and stands on the empty street when he hears the rumble of an approaching tank. The tank stops very close to him. (This is the tank which his dad had promised he would win at the end of the game.) Out pops the head of a cheerful American soldier who invites the young boy to climb onto the tank. You see, the Americans are here to save him and his country from the Germans!

Which is why this movie won Oscars! I remember watching slim Benigni jumping over the heads of the seated audience to reach the Oscar stage after hearing his name being announced!

It's a beautifully sad movie. Benigni does a great job as a director and actor….his efforts to keep the facts hidden from the future generations represented by his son in the movie by making the movie light hearted seems to have paid off. Holocaust is serious business and is hard to watch on the screen (Schindler's List) for many of us!

TRAP - A movie review!

Thankfully there is only a hint of violent behavior and not explicit brutality in this movie making it watchable. The main character in this movie is also called Cooper.

Cooper takes his daughter to a concert by Lady Raven, a pop singer. He is a doting father and indulges his daughter as any American Dad would, I assume. Gradually and confusingly, we discover that Cooper starts doing ‘weird’ stuff like causing a girl to fall down the stairs for no apparent reason! We also see him observing a captive young man through a camera app on his phone. Which makes him seem even weirder, you see! Did Cooper deliberately lock the man before leaving his house or is that young man an intruder on Cooper's property who gets accidentally trapped?

We see a large team of police officials arrive suddenly and surround the stadium. They are looking for a serial killer named ‘the butcher’ who is also inside the stadium! Our hero, Cooper seems weird but not a butcher yet, we still can't connect the dots.

Then we notice him raising the temperature of the fryer while passing a fast food joint causing it to explode and burn a server. But before the explosion, we are shown bottles filled with a liquid inside the overheated oil pan. Cooper didn't place those bottles in there .(And because the director only shows the close up of a hand turning the fryer knob higher while Cooper is close by we have to assume that Cooper did it.) Then Cooper saves the life of a fainting girl by carrying her to a nurse's station after he notices a group of concert workers place her against a railing near Cooper while he is watching his girl dance with lady Raven from the side of the stage.

Surprisingly, Cooper forces Lady Raven to give him and his daughter a ride (using the life of the captive man as bait) in her limousine so he can escape without being noticed by the police.After a few twists and turns, Lady Raven exposes Cooper as being the butcher and helps the man who was Cooper’s prisoner somewhere escape with the help of her online fans.

Towards the end, Cooper is shown as suffering from a motherly complex which is what the police use to capture him…So the question is, is Cooper a ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ‘ type of personality or a victim of circumstances with a psychological disorder?!

Anyway, the entire concert was a trap to catch the butcher. We have seen this type of stuff in old psycho thrillers but not in this low key way where the environment ( shops, crowds, concert etc) surrounding the main characters continues as usual with very little hint of a crime unfolding - a unique Shyamalan approach.

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Twelve Angry Men - A movie review

The title of the movie is ‘TWELVE ANGRY MEN’, which is mostly true, except that one or two are extraordinarily patient and wise (Jack Lemon etc) and the rest are extraordinarily impatient and biased ( George C Scott, Tony Danza etc) as they play part of a jury that decides the fate of a young man who is accused of murdering his own father with a knife that he purchased only a day earlier. There are three colored (black) people in the jury. Only Jack Lemon’s character chooses not guilty verdict initially while the others are in a hurry to pronounce him guilty. There are at least three old men in the jury.

As they argue and scream at each other in the hot and sweaty jury room, their biases slowly unfold. For example, one black man with a religious bent, openly expresses his view that ‘spics’ are taking over the country and this was an opportunity to nail one of them ! Danza's character also changes his vote to not guilty when he overhears a conversation between two jury members during a break and realizes that their votes are based on racism as well. Scott’s character cries in pain ‘you raise your kids with love and care and they leave you to die alone’ . He is biased against the young accused because of his bad experience with his own son!

The patient old man Jack then casts doubt on the evidence presented in the court including the claim of a lady who says she witnessed the murder from a building across the street through the windows of a passing train !

Therefore, the jury in the end passes ‘not guilty ‘ verdict because they cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the young man murdered his father.

The drama unfolds inside a jury room; it could as well have been in a work place, an apartment complex, a public library, a grocery store or a busy street in the USA. Thankfully, the movie stays civilized and the accused is not miamed or shot dead before reaching the court room…

Chalo Dilli - Let us go to Delhi - A movie review

Put a modern corporate type of lady against a simple everyday shopkeeper from Delhi with bad manners but a good heart and you get the story around which this movie is built. The lady hates everything about the shopkeeper but has no choice but to take his help when she finds herself on a plane that lands in Jaipur at night while they are on a flight from Mumbai to Delhi. She rents a taxi to take her to Delhi and the shopkeeper joins her in the taxi because he is also going to Delhi. The viewer might feel that she is being taken advantage of financially by the shopkeeper! The taxi driver falls asleep in the middle of the trip and refuses to go any further leaving them stranded. This leads to a few comic situations…As an example, while the shopkeeper enjoys the oil soaked parathas at the roadside dhaba, our heroine, used to ' health' food, is repulsed by it!

Lara Dutta, India's Miss Uniiverse y2k, plays the role of investment banker very well.This movie is not as funny as Hollywood movie 'Planes, Trains and Automobiles' but why should it be? The background is India and it's two faces - one westernized, rich and a little spoilt and the other struggling to survive!

Andhadhun -A movie review

'Andha' is Hindi word which means blind. However, :andhadhun' means reckless.(The movie is inspired from a French story I) In the context of this movie, Andha + Dhun can also mean a blind person's tune because 'dhun' means tune in Hindi!

interesting premise - a blind young man witnesses a murder. He runs to the police station and confesses he is not blind and tries to report the murder but pauses and tries to escape the police station when he notices that the police inspector is the one who might have committed the murder!

The blind young man is an expert piano player and was invited to play at a retired Bollywood actor's home where he witnesses the dead body of the actor and the police officer hiding in the bathroom with a pistol in his hand. The police officer is having an extra marital affair with the actor's wife, you see! The two do not yet know that the young piano player is not blind.Meanwhile, a 10 year old neighbor has his doubts about the piano player's blindness and uses his phone and a tall stick to spy on the piano player.

Tabu is the main bad guy in the movie - she throws a neighbor to her death from an upper floor. The neighbor had witnessed the husband enter the apartment but never exit. Tabu is the one who was having the affair with the police inspector. The other female character is a young girl who falls in love with the young blind man until she discovers that he is not blind.

Ayushmann Khurana plays the blind young man to perfection and manages to fool the audience for a large part of the movie until the 10 year old neighbor exposes him. Tabu plays the very scary murderess like we have never seen in Bollywood ! The director could have skipped the attempted stealing of body part of the young blind man for another movie. How will anyone trust a auto rickshaw driver in Mumbai again after watching this movie?!

The movie looks realistic because it is made inside a real residential building!

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Perception: A TV series

Friday, August 25, 2023

'PERCEPTION' : There is a neuroscientist in your soup.....

This engrossing 3 season 2014 serial is available with freevee app.

A neuroscientist college professor, Daniel Pierce (DP) , and his partner FBI agent Ms. Morretti collaborate to solve many crimes. The series would have been another CSI except for the fact that DP digs deeper into the reason/s the victim committed the crime. As an example, in the very first episode a lady victim is accused of killing her husband and the FBI is quick to assume that she committed the murder to get his insurance money! When DP interviews her, he discovers that the victim is a mental patient and is innocent. He explains to the FBI, that she belongs in a psychiatric hospital and not in jail because she suffers from a syndrome that makes her mind strongly susceptible to external suggestions. This episode, which is a Pilot, becomes more and more complicated before DP solves the crime; the suspicion shifts to a new person every few minutes - there is a drug company cover-up, cheating spouses and even sexual harassment by a student all within this one episode!

Almost every episode begins with DP explaining neurological parts of the brain and how they function in somewhat flamboyant and interesting manner to his class! The viewers might learn something from these one -minute lessons. DP is usually interrupted by FBI agent Morretti or one of his other acquaintances in the middle of his lecture!

We soon learn that DP is himself suffers from paranoid schizophrenia!! Therefore, as the series progresses, he is visited by many ‘people’ from the past including his dead mother, Sigmond Freud, JFK like politician, Joan of arc, a baseball player and even his own younger self! These hallucinations help him solve many crimes by dropping clues at the appropriate moments when DP displays abnormal amount of nervousness. This changes the series into a science fiction bonanza. But right at the beginning, DP explains to his students, the same set of neurons fire whether you are having an experience while you are awake or asleep and dreaming about it!!

As DP frequently loses touch with his surroundings and starts having conversations with his hallucinatory friends, he needs the help of his very loyal live-in aide young Lewicki to tell him whether the person he is having conversation with is really there!! We sometimes see DP sitting on the sofa having conversation with his psychiatrist and a look alike friend simultaneously and only one is real!

One might feel that the neuroscientist DP takes a lot of professional liberty in some episodes when he creates psychiatric terms to explain behavior of the ‘accused’ who might just be lying! Then there is leftover romance between agent Morretti and her ex-husband which gives us soap opera like moments…..

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OLD : A MOVIE REVIEW

Video Source: FreeVee App

Foreword:

First - M. Night, the director of this movie, is himself part of the villainy in this movie as a very scientific and objective observer on the hill hired by the Research group of a pharmaceutical!!

Second - the aging effect that happens in this movie is assumed to occur in outer space in the context of worm holes (INTERSTELLAR). A returning traveler will find that earth population has aged by years while he has been gone for a few days!

Third - the author of this review has himself experienced this aging effect since his involuntary 'retirement' several years ago as he sees the world changing around him quite rapidly - kids becoming youth and relatives and popular actors of yesteryear aging and dying!!

That should give you enough hints about the story behind this movie .....one has to listen to almost every word uttered by the actors to understand 'OLD". This is not a typical horror movie...but rather a conspiracy by nature and opportunistic Research Scientists!!

Synopsis:

A group of jolly tourists land on a pretty beach resort and are politely offered an alternate private beach by a 'gentleman' at the resort which they accept without reservation. Two kids of the group, a boy and girl, become friends with a sad looking young boy named Idlib! Idlib gives them a puzzle on a piece of paper in an envelope.

I am skipping over the personal stories of the tourists that the director gradually introduces us to! The following will expose most of the suspense that builds up as the movie progresses!!

At this beach weird things seem to happen. A young lady dies while swimming, cuts and wounds begin to heal in a second, kids begin to grow up at an accelerated pace so their own parents can't recognize them, a tumor inside a lady increases to the size of a human head, the dead woman's body withers away within couple of hours leaving behind just the skeleton! One member of the group calculates that for every half hour they spend on the beach they seem to age by a year! And there is no easy way to escape from the beach!

The two kids are now grown adults, within matter of hours on the beach!! They find a diary and by going thru it they discover that there is a special magnetic effect caused by minerals at the beach location which is why humans age rapidly there. The diary was left by tourists, possibly dead, who were on the beach before the current bunch!! After deciphering the puzzle that Idlib gave them, the two conclude that swimming thru the corals might be their only escape to the normal world. The two survivors therefore decide to take the risk and swim thru the corals.

The observer (M Night) at the top of the hill concludes that the two also have drowned and so packs his equipment and declares the trial complete. You see they do not want any tourist to escape from the beach. At the research lab, the project lead who is the same gentleman who had earlier guided the now dead tourists to the private beach, declares the project successful because they have found a cure for epilepsy - you see, one of the dead is a black lady with epileptic seizures. She did not suffer an epileptic seizure for 8.5 hours on the beach after consuming their new medication served via a drink at the resort; 8.5 hours is 17 years in the normal world! The lab gets the results about the effect of their new epilepsy drug within a day instead of waiting for 17 years.

The beach is the laboratory where the pharmaceutical company tests the lifetime effect of their new drugs on humans within matter of a day!! The dead tourists, following protocol, are declared missing until the two survivors manage to escape thru the corals. They hand the diary they discovered on the beach to a cop. The diary includes a list of 'missing' tourists from an earlier group who are all dead. [We can assume that they also share the horror stories of the recent deaths on the beach with the authorities] . Just as an old couple is being very politely guided to that same private beach for the next trial, the two survivors abort the sinister plan of the research lab thus saving the lives of those two and any future guinea pig tourists!

To establish context, the director shows the two middle aged survivors meet the sad young boy Idlib again; the two were that boy's age just a day earlier!! According to a brochure, the resort discouraged young children's access to the private beach and now we know the reason why! They might not age enough to die and might escape from there!!

The research lab of the corporation has no compunction with the fact that their test subjects -the tourists- will die like mice in a test lab!! This is one of the more intelligent movies from M. Night!

The tourists were lured to the resort by a free nights coupon given to them at the pharmacy. The resort is owned by the company that makes drugs !